Nomination at any price
Lobbyist for Pusić’s U.N. bid at the center of an international scandal
Author: Tomislav Kovać
Sunday, 27 March 2016 at 19:49
Vesna Pusić is due to travel to New York in early April to present her bid as one of seven candidates competing to succeed Ban Ki-moon1. At the moment it is not known who is covering the travel and accommodation expenses for the New York trip of the self-proclaimed candidate Pusić who is linked to a number of scandals.
On 24 February 2016, the British web portal ‘Techrights’, specializing in software, computing and intellectual property topics and based in Manchester – the hometown and stronghold of the legendary Joy Division – published an article entitled “Possible Connections Found Between WIPO Misconduct and a Dozen Serious Criminal Charges Against EPO’s Željko Topić” in which the author Roy Schestowitz relied mainly on an article authored by the investigative journalist Darko Petričić which was published on our website on 4 April 2012.
Here is a link to the original Dnevno article:
http://www.dnevno.hr/vijesti/hrvatska/vesna-vukovic-u-genevi-ugoscuje-topica-kojeg-je-zdusno-prijavljivala-dorh-u-i-uskok-u-53626-614473
During the past month credible sources cited by the UK portal Techrights have been predicting with ever increasing certainty the imminent dismissal of the President of the European Patent Organisation (EPO) in Munich, Mr. Benoît Battistelli. As reported by other EU media, the case of corruption at the EPO bears an uncanny resemblance to the international scandal surrounding Sepp Blatter at the FIFA. According to sources, [this could mean that] all of Bastistelli’s management team at the EPO would also be fired, including a Croatian national, Mr. Željko Topić.
The decision about the predicted personnel changes lies in the hands of the EPO Administrative Council, the highest body of this international patent organization. In addition to these predictions, other dénouements are possible: for example, all of the EPO management members could resign irrevocably from their positions. In any case, Mr. Željko Topić was appointed head of the EPO’s Directorate of General Administration on 28 March 2012 following the vigorous support of his candidacy by the EPO President, Benoît Battistelli. Apart from the aforementioned article, last month on 16 February the portal Techrights published a translation of another Dnevno.hr article on the subject of the EPO entitled:
“A New MUST-READ Article From Croatia About EPO Vice-President Željko Topić, Condemning His Behaviour Even Inside the EPO”.
Allegations of corruption related to the EPO and the case of Željko Topić are also being closely monitored in Brussels, by Ms. Monica Macovei and the Croatian MEP Ms. Ruža Tomašić.
THE DIPLOMATIC CHAMELEON OF THE MFEA
To remind our readers, one of the covert lobbyists for Vesna Pusić is Ms. Vesna Vuković, a diplomat and the former ambassador of the Republic of Croatia to the UN in Geneva, who found herself embroiled in an international scandal because, according to the official record, she was the person who filed certain criminal charges against Željko Topić, the former director of the Croatian State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO).
Following her appointment to important diplomatic functions in Geneva, Vuković apologized to Topić after discovering that the gentleman against whom she had filed criminal charges was a member of the ZAMP brigade and the clique of the former President of Croatia, Ivo Josipović, who had appointed her to this position of high responsibility in Geneva.
During the last days of the former Government, as part of her application for the position of UN Secretary-General Vesna Pusić submitted a vision statement concerning the main activities of that international organization2. Thus on 3 April 2016, Mrs. Pusić will be traveling to New York to present her application as one of seven candidates competing to succeed Ban Ki-moon. At this point it is not known who is covering the travel and accommodation expenses for the New York trip of the self-proclaimed candidate Pusić.
Whether by coincidence or not, neither the Croatian Prime Minister, Mr. Tihomir Orešković, the new coalition Government, the competent Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs (MFEA) nor the Croatian Parliament which expressed its disapproval of the manner in which the candidacy had been submitted, have so far made any official statement concerning Pusić’s candidacy either in public or in front of international institutions.
In addition to the already compromised Vesna Vuković and a few carefully selected officials in the MFEA headquarters in Zagreb, Mrs. Dubravka Plejić Marković, the Ambassador of the Republic of Croatia to the UN and OSCE in Vienna, will also be making use of the “complimentary” state facilities to lobby directly on behalf of Vesna Pusić’s candidacy for this prestigious position at the UN. Ms. Plejić Marković is better known to the Croatian public as the spouse of a lawyer heavily involved in the “Spice” scandal involving the staggering amount of over 400 million HRK [approx. 54 million Euro].
Mr. Vladimir Drobnjak, the Ambassador of the Republic of Croatia at the UN headquarters in New York, who is known for the small detail that his son does not speak Croatian, is also involved. In other civilized countries it might not be possible for someone whose child doesn’t speak the national language to be the holder of a diplomatic passport, but when it come to Croatia it seems that everything is possible.
In mid-2015 Mrs. Vesna Vuković was replaced as Ambassador of the Republic Croatia to the UN in Geneva by Mrs. Vesna Batistić Kos, the personal choice of the diplomatically talented Vesna Pusić. Mrs. Pusić’s private initiative and her non-transparent candidacy for the UN position which was hastily endorsed by the signature of Zoran Milanović in the last days of his Government remain a major unsolved riddle for the Croatian and international public, comparable to the mystery of the appointment of the “Croatophobic” Pusić to the presidency of the Croatian People’s Party (HNS) where she replaced the intensely “Croatophile” Savka Dabčević-Kučar.
TOPIĆ AND PERKOVIĆ-MUSTAĆ RECEIVE SIMILAR TREATMENT AT THE STATE ATTORNEY’S OFFICE
The supposition that the criminal charges against Željko Topić are not by any means trivial is confirmed by the fact that Croatian State Prosecutor’s Office for the Suppression of Organized Crime (USKOK) immediately took over the case from the State Attorney’s Office due to the seriousness of the criminal charges. However, after almost 5 years of working on the case, they seem to have decided not to press charges.
The USKOK decision not to pursue the indictment against Topić bears the signature of Ms. Dubravka Krklec who comes from the ranks of Mr. Bajić’s “Bunga – Bunga” female investigators. Since the State Attorney’s Office and USKOK operate along the lines of paramilitary formations a major decision such as the dropping of a criminal indictment against someone like Mr. Topić could not have been taken without the blessings of Mladen Bajić and Dinko Cvitan. As we discovered from unofficial sources, this was the case on which Ms. Sani Ljubičić, the former USKOK investigator and currently the head of the County Attorney’s Office in Zagreb had been working for years.
The case has now been taken over by the Zagreb County Court, that is, by their special department for fighting organized crime and war crimes which declared the charges against Željko Topić to be inadmissible in the court case no. Kir-Us 202/15. As a precautionary measure two separate decisions were issued on that day under the same file reference number. These decisions of the Zagreb County Court bear the signature of the investigative judge Zoran Luburić, a close friend of the president of the Court, Mr. Ivan Turudić.
The case is currently before a three-judge appeal panel of the Zagreb County Court and everyone is reminded of the soap opera and cheap legal games previously seen in the Mustać-Perković case which was played out during the judicial processing of the EU arrest warrant for that infamous duo and where the State Attorney’s Office and some other state institutions sought to obstruct the criminal prosecution of the unmasked State Security Administration (UDBA) agents.
According to several sources in the Croatian judiciary, there are openly voiced concerns in some quarters that in the process of initiating the investigation and proceeding to the detention and indictment of Željko Topić the investigators might at some point be obliged to knock on the door of the unofficial head of ZAMP and the former President of the Republic of Croatia, Dr. Ivo Josipović, as well as that of his cousin, Mr. Mladen Bajić3.
THE MYTHICAL DRAINING OF THE SIPO MARSHES
Apart from the State Attorney’s Office and USKOK, Mr. Zeljko Topic is also the subject of attention of the County Attorney’s Office in Zagreb, where his case is being investigated by the investigator Sunčica Blažević, the former right-hand of the guillotined Željka Pokupec. The investigation was opened because of the “disappearance” of a Mercedes vehicle which once belonged to SIPO and is now apparently parked in the EPO garage in Munich with new license plates under the ownership of Željko Topić. In any case, it is a somewhat bizarre detail which seems to more worthy of a backwoods hustler than a person receiving a monthly salary of over 15,000 Euros.
In addition to the Mercedes, during the time that Željko Topić was the SIPO Director, three more official cars, including an expensive Audi A6 Quattro Tiptronic, “disappeared” by means of mysterious sales contracts. A “mythical” investigation of the former SIPO Director was initiated by Željko Jovanović the former SDP minister in the government of Zoran Milanović, who as documented in the criminal file, publicly admitted that the investigation had to be terminated because of pressure from the Pantovčak [the Office of the Croatian President].
It appears that the initial enthusiasm for the project of draining the SIPO marshes soon disappeared as in the case of a number of other supervisory actions launched under the command of the outspoken Željko Jovanović and his deputy Minister at that time, Mr. Saša Zelenika.
Attached to this article we publish a copy of a public complaint to the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports concerning Topić’s diploma following which an investigation was launched at the SIPO. Additionally, it has been reported that, apparently under pressure from the first violin of ZAMP and the former resident of the Pantovčak [Ivo Josipović], the editorial board of an influential Croatian daily newspaper cancelled a travel request from journalists who had already made arrangements for an official trip to the University of Banja Luka where they had detected very clear signs of a possible forgery of the Masters’ thesis of the EPO’s second fiddle, Mr. Željko Topić.
NOTES
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1 Further articles in English about Pusić’s UN bid can be found here:
7 July 2015: Croatian President Cool on Pusic’s UN Bid -
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/croatian-president-not-focused-on-foreign-minister-s-un-candidacy
8 March 2015: Vesna Pusic: ‘Europe’ asked me to run for UN Secretary-General -
http://www.bosniatoday.ba/vesna-pusic-europe-asked-me-to-run-for-un-secretary-general/
12 January 2016: Outgoing and Incoming Governments at Odds Over Croatian Candidate for UN Secretary-General-
http://www.total-croatia-news.com/politics/2085-outgoing-and-incoming-governments-at-odds-over-croatian-candidate-for-un-secretary-general
3 September 2015: Croatian Leaders Row Over Pusic’s UN Candidacy
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/croatian-government-backs-foreign-minister-for-un-secretary-general-09-03-2015
2 The presentation of Pusić’s candidacy to the Security Council of the UN’s General Assembly is available online at this link:
http://www.un.org/pga/70/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/01/A.70.687-S.2016.40-Croatia.pdf
Pusić’s “Vision Statement” is available online at this link:
http://www.un.org/pga/70/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2016/01/Secretary-General-Election-Vision-Statement_Croatia-5-April-2016.pdf
3 The relationship between Josipović and Bajić was the subject of an article published in Tjedno on 6 May 2012
JOSIPOVIĆ I BAJIĆ ROĐACI
http://www.tjedno.hr/josipovi-i-baji-roaci/
“But the public remains completely in the dark about the fact that Ivo Josipović and Mladen Bajić are blood relatives. The blood relationship is admittedly a distant one, but nevertheless they are cousins. Ivo Josipović was born in Zagreb on 28 August 1958, and Mladen Bajić in Split on 28 December 1950 and both originate from the Makarska region. So far neither Josipović nor Bajić have revealed to the public that they are related which in part explains their close collaboration and co-ordinated action.”
The pressure exerted by Josipović on Bajić in the Mustać-Perković case was reported on by Željko Peratović in his “45lines” blog in January 2014:
Will the Supreme Court of Croatia ban the extradition of Josip Perković?
http://en.45lines.com/will-the-supreme-court-of-croatia-ban-the-extradition-of-josip-perkovic/
The above contains little new information regarding Željko Topić himself, though we find quite ‘juicy’ the part about the “Mercedes vehicle which once belonged to SIPO and is now apparently parked in the EPO garage in Munich with new license plates under the ownership of Željko Topić.” Can anyone verify this? We have heard rumours to that effect for quite some time and apparently some photos were circulating as well (whereupon Team Battistelli truly panicked). If such photographs still exist somewhere, then we hope someone will share these with us for publication. █
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